WooCommerce vs Shopify: Which Is Better for Your Store? (2026)

WooCommerce and Shopify are the two most common ways to run an online store, and they take opposite approaches. Shopify is a hosted service: you pay a monthly fee, and Shopify runs the servers, security and updates for you. WooCommerce is free, open-source software that runs on your own WordPress site, so you choose the hosting and extensions, and you’re responsible for keeping it all running.

A quick note on where we stand: we make WooCommerce plugins, so we’re not neutral. We’ve tried to be fair anyway, because Shopify genuinely is the better choice for some stores. The prices below were checked on each company’s website in September 2026.

The short answer

Choose Shopify if you want to start selling quickly, you don’t want to deal with hosting, updates or security, and a fixed monthly bill with 24/7 support is worth more to you than full control.

Choose WooCommerce if you want to own your store and its data outright, avoid platform transaction fees, customise the checkout, or build a store around a lot of content, such as a blog or guides. It also makes sense if you already have a WordPress site.

WooCommerce vs Shopify at a glance

	WooCommerce	Shopify
Software cost	Free	From £25 / $39 a month (less if paid yearly)
Hosting	You choose and pay for it	Included
Updates and security	Your responsibility	Handled by Shopify
Platform transaction fees	None	2% on Basic if you don’t use Shopify Payments
Checkout customisation	Full	Limited, except on Shopify Plus
Extensions	Tens of thousands of WordPress plugins, many free	Thousands of apps, mostly monthly subscriptions
Content and blogging	WordPress, the most widely used CMS	Basic blog built in
Support	Forums, plus your host and plugin developers	24/7 from Shopify
Data and code	On your own server	On Shopify’s platform

What each one really costs

Shopify

Shopify charges a monthly subscription, and the price includes hosting, an SSL certificate and support:

Plan	UK (monthly / yearly)	US (monthly / yearly)	Online card rate (UK)	Fee if not using Shopify Payments
Basic	£25 / £19	$39 / $29	from 2% + 25p	2%
Grow	£65 / £49	$105 / $79	from 1.7% + 25p	1%
Advanced	£344 / £259	$399 / $299	from 1.5% + 25p	0.6%
Plus	from £1,800	from $2,300	from 1.3% + 25p	0.2%

The card rate is what you pay on each order through Shopify Payments. If you use a different payment provider, Shopify adds the fee in the last column on top of that provider’s own charges. Most stores also add a few paid apps, for things like reviews, subscriptions or loyalty programmes, and these are usually billed monthly.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce itself is free, and WooCommerce doesn’t charge any fee on your sales. What you do pay for is:

• Hosting and a domain. This is the biggest variable. Cheap shared hosting struggles with a busy store, so it’s worth paying for a host that specialises in WordPress or WooCommerce.
• Card processing. WooPayments, WooCommerce’s own payment service, charges 1.5% + 25p for UK cards in the UK and 2.9% + 30¢ for US cards in the US, with no monthly fee. You can use Stripe, PayPal or almost any other provider instead.
• Paid extensions. Many plugins are free, but premium ones are usually sold as yearly licences.
• Your time, or a developer’s. Someone has to run updates, keep backups and fix things when they break.

A worked example

Take a UK store selling £5,000 a month through 100 orders of £50, all paid by UK cards. These figures are illustrative, not a quote:

• Shopify Basic, paid monthly: £25 subscription, plus card fees of 2% + 25p per order (£125), comes to about £150 a month before any apps.
• WooCommerce with WooPayments: card fees of 1.5% + 25p per order (£100), plus hosting. If hosting is £20 a month, that’s about £120 a month before any paid plugins.

At this size the difference is small, and a few paid apps or plugins can easily swing it either way. The gap grows with turnover, because the difference in card rates applies to every sale, while WooCommerce’s fixed costs mostly depend on your hosting. The bigger cost with WooCommerce is often time: if you’d rather pay someone to maintain the site, that can outweigh the savings.

Setup and day-to-day running

Shopify is quicker to start with. You create an account, pick a theme, add products and connect a payment method, and you never think about servers. Updates happen in the background, and help is available around the clock.

WooCommerce needs a little more setup: hosting, WordPress, the WooCommerce plugin, then a theme and payment method. Many hosts now install WordPress and WooCommerce for you, and WooCommerce’s setup wizard handles the basics. The ongoing work is the real difference. You, or someone you pay, need to update WordPress, WooCommerce and your plugins, keep backups, and test the checkout after updates. If you enjoy that kind of control, it’s a strength. If you don’t, it’s a chore Shopify removes.

Customisation and extensions

This is where WooCommerce is strongest. Because it’s open source and runs on your own server, anything can be changed, including the checkout, which Shopify only lets you fully customise on Plus. WooCommerce stores can choose from the tens of thousands of plugins in the WordPress.org directory, plus premium extensions from WooCommerce.com and independent developers like us.

Shopify’s app store has thousands of apps too, and they’re usually easy to install. The difference is mostly in how you pay: most Shopify apps are monthly subscriptions, while many WooCommerce plugins are free or sold as a yearly licence. Over a few years, a store running several apps can pay noticeably more on Shopify for the same features.

Content and SEO

Both platforms can rank well in search engines, and both handle the basics such as page titles, descriptions and sitemaps. WooCommerce has the edge if content matters to your business, because it runs on WordPress, the most widely used content management system. Guides, recipes, buying advice and blog posts sit alongside your products, with the full WordPress editor and SEO plugins behind them.

Shopify’s blog is fine for occasional posts. It’s less flexible for larger content sites, and some URL structures are fixed, such as /products/ and /collections/.

Payments

Shopify works best with Shopify Payments, which includes Shop Pay, Shopify’s fast checkout that saves customers’ details. You can use other payment providers, but you’ll pay Shopify’s third-party transaction fee on top, from 2% on Basic down to 0.2% on Plus.

WooCommerce adds no platform fee on top of your payment provider’s charges, whichever provider you use. WooPayments, Stripe and PayPal all offer Apple Pay and Google Pay, and there are plugins for most regional payment methods. That freedom also helps if your products are ones some payment providers won’t handle, because you can pick a provider that accepts them.

Ownership and moving later

With WooCommerce, your store runs on your own hosting. You can move it to another host, take a full backup of everything, or change any part of it, and nobody else decides what you can sell beyond the law, your host and your payment provider.

With Shopify, your store runs on Shopify’s platform and under its terms. You can export products, customers and orders as CSV files, but your theme and apps don’t come with you if you leave. That isn’t a problem for most stores, but it’s worth knowing before you commit years of work to either platform.

Growing and handling traffic

Shopify handles traffic spikes for you, which is a real advantage around Black Friday or a product launch. WooCommerce can handle very large stores too, but how well it copes depends on your hosting and how the site is built. If you expect big spikes, choose a host that specialises in WooCommerce and test your site before busy periods.

Our verdict

Neither is better for everyone. Shopify is the easier choice if you want to focus purely on selling and you’re happy to pay monthly for someone else to run the technical side. WooCommerce is the better long-term choice if you want control, no platform fees, a flexible checkout, or a store built around content, and you’re comfortable looking after a WordPress site or paying someone who is.

If you do choose WooCommerce, the extras you’d pay a monthly app fee for on Shopify, such as affiliate programmes, loyalty points and store credit, are available as plugins. Ours are on our plugins page, and most have a free version on WordPress.org.